Revised List of Electors by December 24 –GECOM CEO

Dec 19, 2019 News

The Revised List of Electors, (RLE) will be ready by December 29, Chief Elections Officer of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Keith Lowenfield told a media conference yesterday.
Lowenfield explained that GECOM is pushing towards getting the revised list circulated and vetted in 21 days. The 21 days of claims and objections are set to commence on January 5, 2020.
The CEO stressed the need for GECOM to produce a credible list of electors. He said that for this reason GECOM is at pains to ensure that the list is adequately scrutinised.
Speaking on the five-day verification exercise for the list of new registrants, Lowenfield told reporters that he will meet with the scrutineers to operationalise the conduct of the exercise.
He said that the Commission will need all hands on deck to complete house-to-house verification of 16,000 names in the space of five days.
“We have permanent staff on board as well as those persons who worked with GECOM during the recent truncated house -to-house exercise. They will work over the course of the five days.”
He said too that the Commission will, at the next statutory meeting, deliberate on the new names as well as the list that was subject to claims and objections exercise.
“For those persons who are not found, GECOM will determine what course of action will be taken at the next statutory meeting.
On Tuesday, GECOM in a majority decision agreed to conduct a house-to-house verification of new registrants, which number approximately 16,000 persons. PPP-nominated Commissioner, Sase Gunraj, told the press that the verification of the data will be conducted within the next five days.
He noted that “Our hope is that the GECOM staffers will pursue this exercise with the type of diligence that it requires to provide satisfaction to the electorate, to the public and all those concerned who have an interest in our having free, fair, transparent and peaceful elections,” he said.
He explained that there has been a list of 20,000 unverified new registrants. Of the 20,000, Gunraj noted that about 4,020 of the persons were duplicates on the preliminary list of electors. That brought the list of new registrants to about 16,000.
Government-appointed Commissioner Vincent Alexander expressed his disappointment at the decision, calling the verification process “useless”.
He told reporters that there is no need for the verification exercise.
“As far as I am concerned, nothing else is to be done, because those duplicates could have been investigated and hearings conducted.”
It got to the point where we have done an internal side-by-side comparison of the information… Field exercise has nothing to do with duplicates,” Alexander said.
He noted, “It’s a decision GECOM could have made, but I wouldn’t say it is illegal; it is useless,” he added.
Last month, GECOM launched a verification exercise after it noticed striking disparities in the cross-matched data that had returned from the overseas supplier.
Gemalto, an international digital security company, was contracted by GECOM to cross-match the house-to-house data.
Both tranches of data were returned and they appeared to indicate that there are about 60,000 total new registrants. This unusually high figure prompted the Secretariat to conduct its own assessment of the cross-matched data.

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